Week of November 27, 2017

Intrepid Report Newsletter
We cannot keep publishing without your help. We have no paywalls or ads. Nor do we receive corporate or foundation funding. All we have is you to keep us publishing. We rely on you to help us pay our monthly expenses. So please Donate  Monday ‘Worse than one could imagine’: Commissioner decries FCC chair’s attack on net neutrality By Jake Johnson In an effort to combat the “mountain of lies” FCC chair Ajit Pai has deployed to justify his newly released plan to kill net neutrality, Democratic FCC commissioner Mignon Clyburn unveiled a fact sheet (pdf) on Wednesday aimed at helping Americans understand that Pai’s proposals are “worse than one could imagine” and highlighting their life-or-death implications for the open The fact sheet, an easily digestible two pages in length, runs through a series of commonly asked and frequently confusing questions surrounding net neutrality: what it is, why it’s important, and how Pai’s plan would affect the web. For the GOP, incompetence is a feature, not a flaw By Mike Lofgren It has been said that Newt Gingrich is “a dumb person’s idea of a smart person.” Who coined that phrase is a matter of scholarly dispute, but there is broad agreement that the sentiment is applicable. I will go further and say this characteristic of Newt’s is not just a personal foible; it establishes a model for Republican politicians and operatives since his time in Congress. Fools or knaves? By Robert Reich One of the most dangerous consequences of this awful period in American life is the denigration of the truth, and of institutions and people who tell it. A mass murderer’s love song to Trump When a guy who's compared himself to Hitler sings love ballads to the U.S. president, we've got a problem. By Jim Hightower “We’ve had a great relationship,” exulted a giddy Donald Trump, following his two-day schmoozefest in Manila with the thuggish Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte. Are billionaire noblemen the new knights in shining armor? By Ben Tanosborn We keep saying that the nation is divided: two camps, two ideologies, two political clans at the ready every minute of the day to do battle. But that’s oversimplifying the sad fact that even if our pledge of allegiance appears lofty and humanely unifying, the reality we live unveils our nation as divisible with questionable liberty and justice for all. Wednesday Kissing our a*#@s goodbye in a nuclear war By Howard Lisnoff The late novelist Kurt Vonnegut recounts the horrors of the firebombing of Dresden, Germany in both the fictional work Slaughterhouse Five and his book of nonfictional essays, Armageddon In Retrospect. Vonnegut was a World War II veteran who had his boots on the ground, so he pretty much knew his subject. He makes a point that the death toll from firebombing cities was not too much different from the two atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped over Japan in August 1945. But with the advent of the hydrogen bomb, mass annihilation is a safe bet today. In ‘blow to American consumers,’ Trump-appointed judge sides with Trump on CFPB "Who knows what deep damage Mulvaney will do until the D.C. Circuit can right this wrong." By Jake Johnson A Trump-appointed federal judge delivered a “blow to American consumers” on Tuesday by denying Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) deputy director Leandra English’s request for a temporary restraining order, which would have prevented Trump budget chief Mick Mulvaney from becoming the CFPB’s acting director. Trump wants welfare in America ended By Stephen Lendman During the Great Depression, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) provided financial help to children of low or no-income families. Once again, the right hijacks that old time religion By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship In Babylon-on-the-Potomac recently, the brand new, $500 million Museum of the Bible had its grand opening. Donald Trump did not attend, perhaps fearing a fate like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark when the remnants of the Ten Commandments are unsealed, holy mayhem ensues and miscreants melt like candles. Can’t you see war is on the horizon? By Paul Craig Roberts According to news reports in the British press, Russian President Vladimir Putin has instructed Russia’s industries to prepare themselves to be able to make a quick switch to war production. Friday America’s bargain with the Devil By Jacob Hornberger As many Americans know, the National Archives ended up releasing only about 5 percent of the CIA’s JFK-assassination-related records, notwithstanding the fact that the JFK Records Act, which is the law, required the release of all of them. Earthquake risk keeps heat on vulnerable nuclear reactors By Harvey Wasserman A proposal by a California administrative law judge has given safe energy advocates new hope that two Diablo Canyon nuclear reactors will be shut before an earthquake on the San Andreas fault turns them to rubble, potentially threatening millions of people. Freedom Rider: Contradictions of white supremacy By Margaret Kimberley American media have a collective crush on avowed racists. The New York Times is only the most recent perpetrator with their now maligned profile of an Ohio Nazi . The kid glove approach was too obvious and readers rose up in uproar. The back pedaling and apologizing shouldn’t let them off the hook, nor allow their colleagues at other outlets to escape scrutiny. The alt-right got a significant boost from a puff piece profile of their leader Richard Spencer in the supposedly progressive Mother Jones. Mother Jones referred to the “prom-king good looks” of the “dapper white nationalist.” Decades of US diplomacy has failed: Why the US wants to shut down PLO office By Ramzy Baroud On November 18, just days before the 50th anniversary of United Nations Resolution 242, the US State Department took its first step towards severing its ties with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Nervous about traffic stops? I am. You should be, too By John W. Whitehead We’ve all been there before.
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5 of the Most Important JFK Files the CIA Is Still Hiding

20 November 17

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FOCUS: 5 of the Most Important JFK Files the CIA Is Still Hiding 

Jefferson Morley, AlterNet
Morley writes: "The government's release of long-secret JFK assassination records is generating headlines and hype worldwide. But the truth is the majority of the JFK files that were supposed to be released last month remain secret - and may forever if the CIA has its way."
READ MORE

The records of top undercover officers implicated in the assassination story are still secret or heavily censored

he government’s release of long-secret JFK assassination records is generating headlines and hype worldwide. But the truth is the majority of the JFK files that were supposed to be released last month remain secret — and may forever if the CIA has its way.

On October 24, President Trump tweeted that "JFK files are released long ahead of schedule," which was not true.

In fact, as Rex Bradford, president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, pointed out in WhoWhatWhy, only about 10 percent of the JFK files were public by the statutory deadline of October 26. The foundation maintains an online collection of more than 1 million JFK records.

The hype continued November 3, when the National Archives posted more than 553 CIA documents never made public before, which CNN described as a “horde." On November 9, the CIA and NSA released another batch of files, which the Washington Post called a "huge trove."

But as Bradford told AlterNet this weekend, the impressive-sounding numbers lacked context. Even after the latest file dump on November 9, at least two-thirds of the never-seen JFK files that were supposed to be released — some 2,538 records — remain secret, according to the foundation's analysis.

At least one-third of the JFK files that were previously released with redactions — a total of about 12,000 files — have still not been made public in unexpurgated form, he said.

Unlike mainstream news organizations, the Mary Ferrell Foundation monitors the National Archives database for the latest information on what has and has not been released. Bradford called the releases so far "a big roiling mess."

What Are They Hiding?

The still-secret files document the careers of five top CIA officers implicated in the events that culminated in the murder of the popular liberal president in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1863.

The publicly available portions of these files do not contain “smoking gun” proof of conspiracy. But they do refute the official story that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and unaided. While incomplete, the new JFK files show that Oswald did not act alone in the years, months and weeks leading up to Kennedy's murder. The files confirm he acted while being monitored and surveilled by top undercover CIA officers.

Four of these five officers knew of Oswald’s personal history, foreign travels and contacts with a presumed KGB officer in Mexico City six weeks before Kennedy was shot and killed. They include:

1. James Angleton: The legendary chief of counterintelligence testified to Senate investigators behind closed doors in September 1975. The 155-page transcript of his comments is still secret in its entirety.

2. Birch O’Neal: Virtually unknown in the vast literature of JFK’s assassination, O’Neal played a key role in the CIA’s monitoring of Oswald. As an aide to Angleton, O’Neal ran a secretive office known as the Special Investigations Group, which opened the agency’s first file on Oswald in October 1959 (a story I tell in my new biography of Angleton, The Ghost).

Of the 224 pages in the O’Neal file released on November 3, 177 pages contain redactions, and three are wholly secret.

3. David Phillips: A decorated undercover officer, Phillips served as chief of Cuba operations in Mexico City in 1963. He supervised the surveillance of the Cuban Consulate in the Mexican capital, which Oswald visited six weeks before JFK was assassinated.

His personnel files containing 602 pages of material were released November 3, but 60 percent of those pages are fully or partially redacted. Only 227 pages are open to the public.

4. Ann Goodpasture: The senior woman in the Mexico City station in 1963, Goodpasture worked closely with Phillips and coordinated the station’s audio and photo surveillance operations during Oswald’s visit to Mexico City in September 1963.

Of 288 pages of material in the Goodpasture file, 95 pages (33 percent) contain some redactions, and 18 pages (6 percent) remain completely secret.

5. George Joannides: A psychological warfare operations officer who worked in Miami and New Orleans, Joannides handled the anti-Castro Cuban Student Directorate, which was funded by the CIA under the code name AMSPELL. Members of the group had a series of confrontations with Oswald in New Orleans in the summer of 1963.

The CIA has released 87 pages of AMSPELL documents, 72 of which are partly redacted. The only material made public was newspaper articles and brochures about the Cuban Student Directorate. None of the documents are dated before 1964.

The CIA told Trump that the JFK files could not be released because disclosure might endanger living CIA agents, an irrelevant objection in the case of these files. Angleton died in 1987, O'Neal died in 1995, Phillips died in 1988, Goodpasture died in 2011, and Joannides died in 1991.

What Have We Learned?

Judge John Tunheim, who oversaw the declassification of 4 million pages of JFK files in the 1990s, called the CIA withholding "disappointing."

"They knew this deadline long ago," Tunheim told Politico’s Bryan Bender. "It should have been done by Oct. 26, 2017."

Dan Hardway, a West Virginia attorney and former investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, notes that the CIA is not in compliance with the JFK Records Act, which requires federal agencies to provide a written explanation for withholding any files past October 26.

On the website of the Assassination Archives and Research Center in Washington, D.C., Hardway writes:

"There has been no explanation, let alone a presidential certification, that the massive redactions in these 'released in full' documents meet any of the mandatory exemptions that allow withholding. No identifiable harm is specified. No rationale is given as to why the secrets protected outweigh the public interest in disclosure. These files are not in compliance with the law no matter what the mainstream media says.”

Like Tunheim and Hardway, I doubt the CIA hiding “smoking gun” proof of a JFK conspiracy in these files. But after studying the JFK assassination for 25 years and James Angleton’s career for three, I believe there is smoking gun proof in the still-secret files about one of the CIA’s most sensitive secrets: that Lee Harvey Oswald was a CIA asset, witting or unwitting, who was used by Angleton and possibly others, for undisclosed intelligence purposes in the years, months and weeks before President Kennedy was gunned down.

Was the CIA’s monitoring and use of Oswald part of a conspiracy to kill the liberal president? There’s no definitive proof of that, but given the extraordinary secrecy still surrounding these records 54 years after the fact, it would be willfully naïve to rule out the possibility. Until all of the JFK files are released, the conspiracy question will be unresolved because of CIA secrecy.

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/46950-focus-5-of-the-most-important-jfk-files-the-cia-is-still-hiding

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Intrepid Report Newsletter Week of Novemberr 6, 2017

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Intrepid Report Newsletter
We cannot keep publishing without your help. We have no paywalls or ads. Nor do we receive corporate or foundation funding. All we have is you to keep us publishing. We rely on you to help us pay our monthly expenses. So please Donate Monday The public bank option—safer, local and half the cost By Ellen Brown A UK study published on October 27, 2017 reported that the majority of politicians do not know where money comes from. Can Democrats stop Virginia, Alabama elections from being stolen? By Harvey Wasserman Donald Trump’s primary enablers, the corporate Democrats, may be poised to blow it again in upcoming elections in Virginia on Nov. 7 and Alabama on Dec. 12. US climate assessment exposes ‘simply terrifying’ recklessness of Trump ‘Even as this report sounds the alarm, Trump's team of climate deniers are twisting themselves into pretzels to justify blocking national and international climate action.’ By Jon Queally With the release of its National Climate Assessment on Friday, the U.S. government has released a report—which states the current period is “now the warmest in the history of modern civilization”—that critics say directly and irrefutably undermines the climate denialism and inaction of President Donald Trump and his administration. Back to the USA By Linh Dinh To go home, I had to take a taxi to Saigon’s airport, fly to Hanoi, then on to Hong Kong, where during a 5½ hour layover I’d take a train to Central to hang out a bit, then back to the airport to fly to JFK, then hop on two trains just to get to Manhattan, then two more to reach Philly’s 30th Street Station, from where I could, finally, take two subways to my South Philadelphia neighborhood. With so many legs to a trip, a thousand things could go wrong. Paging Dr. Vogel By Missy Comley Beattie My mother used to say, “She needs to have her head examined.” Or, “He needs to have his head examined.” I thought of her, of this, when I read that Stephen Paddock’s brain is in route for examination at Stanford University where Dr. Hannes Vogel will analyze the tissue for any number of neurological disorders that might shed light on motive for the mass shooting in Las Vegas Tuesday Oliver Stone was right about the CIA By Jacob Hornberger I can’t decide which is more amusing: the CIA’s use of “national security” to justify keeping secret its 50-year-old records in the JFK assassination or the mainstream media’s response to the continued secrecy. Trump’s most damning legacy By Robert Reich In a radio interview on Thursday, Trump said “the saddest thing is, because I am the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I’m not supposed to be involved with the FBI. I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things I would love to be doing.” US ground invasion of North Korea considered? By Stephen Lendman Sound deranged? If US officials devoted the same time, effort and resources for world peace, equity and justice, all Americans could benefit in ways unimaginable now. What real tax reform could look like We don't actually have to cut taxes on the rich, slash services for everyone, and blow a hole in the deficit. By Olivia Alperstein No matter our politics, most Americans have a beef with taxes. And it’s no wonder. Turning Amerika into America By Philip A Farruggio First off, for purposes of proper understanding, let us agree that we are an empire, and have been since the end of WW2. Let us then agree that we are not just an empire, but a Military Industrial Empire, with at least 1,000 bases in over 100 different countries. What has been news to this writer and the majority of our citizens is the fact that we have troops in 90% of African countries. Of course, we all know of our vast military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq . . . for too long to even comprehend, as well as our illegal drone attacks on too many nations. Wednesday Arabian peninsula returns to warring princes and tribes By Wayne Madsen Saudi Arabia’s 32-year old crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman al-Saud, fancies himself as a champion of “moderate Wahhabism,” something that does not actually exist, and clean government. In fact, this fast-rising son of the decrepit 81-year old King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, was a prime motivator behind the creation of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), or “Da’esh,” in Iraq and Syria, the chief architect of the genocidal Saudi-led war in Yemen, and the driving force behind the Gulf Cooperation Council’s economic and travel sanctions imposed on Qatar. Twitter rules changed By Stephen Lendman Speech, media and academic freedoms in America are threatened—especially digital democracy, the last frontier of open and free expression. America breaks down: The anatomy of a national nervous breakdown By John W. Whitehead Another shooting, another day in America. A year without a president By Robert Reich It seems like forever, but it was just one year ago that Donald Trump was elected president. So what have we learned about the presidency and who is running the country? Americans are no longer represented by their government: Retired educator and World War II veteran does something about it By William John Cox Mel E. Lindsey no longer believes the American people are represented by their government. The 90-year-old resident of Long Beach, California—who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and who spent more than 50 years in education—is concerned for the future of the nation he fought for and for the children he taught. Wanting to do something about it, Mel petitioned the government on behalf of all Americans and demanded a Voter’s Bill of Rights amendment to the Constitution to provide everyone with the right to cast effective votes for their representatives. Thursday The Fakebook inside Facebook What to do about a global info-and-disinfo pipeline, and who can do it? By Todd Gitlin Beginning in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg and his companions made a historic contribution to the annals of alchemy: They converted the lust for human contact into gold. Facebook’s current net worth is more than $500 billion, with Zuckerberg’s own share tallied at $74.2 billion, which makes him something like the fifth-wealthiest person in the world. The myth of European democracy: A shocking revelation By Alex Gorka It’s an open secret that the “Soros network” has an extensive sphere of influence in the European Parliament and in other European Union institutions. The list of Soros has been made public recently. The document lists 226 MEPs from all sides of political spectrum, including former President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz, former Belgian PM Guy Verhofstadt, seven vice-presidents, and a number of committee heads, coordinators, and quaestors. These people promote the ideas of Soros, such as bringing in more migrants, same-sex marriages, integration of Ukraine into the EU, and countering Russia. There are 751 members of the European Parliament. It means that the Soros friends have more than one third of seats. Fascism fails in Virginia—is Alabama next? By Harvey Wasserman Steve Bannon’s attempted fascist putsch in Virginia and New Jersey has failed. Voters reject Trumpism in Tuesday’s US gubernatorial elections By Stephen Lendman The Virginia and New Jersey elections attracted national interest, why they got mine, along with how anti-Trump sentiment might affect them. Republicans admit their tax plan is all about rich donors It’s unpopular. It’s expensive. But the donors want it. By Peter Certo Sometimes I have to remind myself that people in “real America” with “real jobs” don’t while away their mortal hours reading about politics. But God help me, if you’ve suffered through any coverage of the Republican tax plan, you’ve probably heard three things. Friday Reviving the spirit of existential rebellion in a world of propaganda, lies, and self deception By Edward Curtin Like existential freedom, honesty and truth-seeking demand a perpetually renewed commitment. No one ever fully arrives, and all of us are blown off course on the journey. Even when we think we have reached our destination, we are often startled by the enigma of arrival, and must set sail again. We are all in the same boat. The search for truth is a process, an experiment, an essay—a trying without end. The UN and genocide by starvation By Thomas C. Mountain According to just released information sourced from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the FSNAU between October 2015 and April 2016, a period of only six months, upwards of 400,000 Somali’s, two thirds of whom were children, died of starvation. ‘Creeping annexation’: Why Israel shelved the ‘Greater Jerusalem Law’ By Ramzy Baroud The postponing of an Israeli Knesset bill that would have annexed major illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank to the Jerusalem municipality is the result of behind-the-scenes US and, possibly, European pressure. But the story of the so-called ‘Greater Jerusalem law’ does not end there. Three richest Americans now own more wealth than bottom half of us combined: report "The elite ranks of our billionaire class continue to pull apart from the rest of us," a new Institute for Policy study analysis finds By Jake Johnson In the United States, the 400 richest individuals now own more wealth than the bottom 64 percent of the population and the three richest own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent, while pervasive poverty means one in five households have zero or negative net worth. Is US war on Iran likely? By Stephen Lendman Washington has been militantly hostile toward Iran since its 1979 revolution—ending a generation of US-installed tyranny.
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